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Leader Monitors Ensure 4K Quality

BURBANK, CALIF.—Every production is
important, but when we at Band Pro decided
to take Sony’s new F65 digital motion
picture camera on a fast-paced demo
shoot in Hawaii, the stakes were particularly
high. The camera had only been released
a few weeks earlier and our footage would
be some of the first high-end images to be
released outside of Sony. The end goal was
a short documentary to debut at this year’s
NAB Show.

4K FOCUS IS VERY CRITICAL

The Leader LV5330

The concept was to capture the natural
wonders of the islands, primarily from
helicopters at 4K resolution. Pulling focus
at high resolutions becomes extremely
critical, especially when using fast lenses.
Our schedule included a number of sunrise
and sunset shots where we might only
have one chance to get it right. With these
factors in mind, I chose to take a Leader
LV5330 monitor into these harsh and exacting
environments to pull focus and
monitor exposure.

While soaring along the Ne Pali coast,
over active volcanoes, and through jungle
canyons, I sat in the back of the helicopter
holding the LV5330 in my lap and used the
monitor’s 1:1 display mode and the F65’s
pixel-to-pixel zoom to make sure that the
shots remained in focus during tight situation,
switching back and forth between
1:1 and the waveform view. When needed
I could switch to the Cinelite setting
to double check the waveform and get a
more rounded, three-dimensional view of
the scene exposure.

I wasn’t the only one in the helicopter
with a Leader monitor. I also brought the
larger Leader LV5380 for our DP/director,
Ruben Carrillo, to use while controlling
the camera on a Tyler nose mount. He usually
had it set to multiview mode to display
the picture and waveform simultaneously.
As I trust Leader’s scopes, and we had the
information right at our fingertips, Ruben
and I were able to have detailed conversations
about the exposure with the confidence
that our monitors were giving us
identical results.

Occasionally during the shoot
we would land the helicopter,
grab camera gear, and hike out into
some very treacherous terrain.
For all these ground operations I
chose the more lightweight Leader
LV5330 as our onboard monitor
and mounted it with a Noga Arm.
The monitor encountered damp
jungle and salty spraying coastline,
but the true test for all of our gear
was the lava field.

TRIAL BY LAVA AND STEAM

Ruben and I carried the camera onto a
wind-swept lava field to within 10 feet of a
red-hot active flow in the pouring rain. The
air temperature was about 150 degrees and
the rain was immediately turning to steam
as it hit the lava surface. It’s hard to image
a more challenging shooting environment.
We faced extremes in all four of the classical
elements: earth, water, air and fire. I was
wondering who would give in first—us or
the equipment. As it turned out, the monitor
and camera were rock-solid the whole
way through and we came back with some
amazing footage for presentation at the
Band Pro NAB Show booth. The leader
monitors played a big part in ensuring that
we got this once-in-a-lifetime footage right.

Randy Wedick is a technical consultant
at Band Pro Film & Digital. He educates
and advises customers in all aspects
of imaging and workflow. He may be contacted
at randy.wedick@bandpro.com.